Many people experience painful and disturbing electrical shocks due to electrostatic discharge (ESD) when they exit their vehicles during dry weather. Observations, field tests and measurements have shown that the ESDs that cause such shocks are predominantly caused by triboelectric charging of the human body due to the separation of dissimilar materials as occupants exit a vehicle. Often, ESDs occur when a person's charge is neutralized by a connection to earth ground as he or she touches a conductive part of a vehicle after exiting.
In addition to the considerable discomfort caused by such ESD, reports by the Petroleum Equipment Institute in 2010 (below), suggest that such body charging was likely responsible for sparks that started almost two hundred fires, some deadly, at gasoline filling stations in the U.S., from 1999 to 2004. Static-related fires continue to occur, although the number of fires per year has dropped since that time due, in part, to improved filling station practices such as eliminating pump nozzle latches and the posting of safety instructions at pumps. Numerous other petroleum industry studies, including one by the American Petroleum Institute in 2014 (below), provide evidence of human body charging as the cause of fires.
Hearn, in 2014 (below), disclosed that human body triboelectric charging has also been implicated in the unintentional deployment of some air bags.
Since the subject ESDs likely occur many hundreds of millions of times per year or more in the U.S. alone, it seems prudent to shift the odds in favor of consumer comfort and safety.